Running RNode on Amazon AWS (EC2)

Setting up RNode on a VPS or a cloud service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 is desirable for users who are not able to set port forwarding or UPNP due to various network setups, or for users who might want to run RNode for long periods (via screen).

This is a step by step guide to run RNode 0.5.3 on Amazon Web Services. The guide uses instances that are eligible for the Amazon 12 month free tier https://aws.amazon.com/free/.

You can Select either: “Create a new key pair” or “choose an existing one.”

Select “create a new key pair”

Note: If you create a new key pair, you must download the pem file before you can launch the Instance.

Type in a name for the key pair name

Note: for this tutorial we will call it: EC2-1

Then click “Download key Pair”

Note: Store this file in a safe place

Last click “Launch Instance”

Once it launches, you will see a banner that says: “Your Instances are now launching”. Click the Instance ID and take a note of the instance public DNS. It will be used as the address to SSH to from our local machine.

2. SSH to your EC2 instance:

Open up terminal or the PowerShell (if you are a Windows user).

For Linux and MacOS users, the pem file will need strict permissions:

Open a terminal and change the permissions of the .pem file.

$ chmod 400 ~/.ssh/ec2-1.pem

Once your instance is initialised, use your private key file (ec2–1.pem) and the address of your EC2 instance (the Public DNS we mentioned above) to log in.

Hi, I ran through the steps on a clean EC2 install and got all the way to step 5. When I run the rnode command, I get a command not found error. I installed the release version off of the menu in step 4. Any idea why I can’t run rnode?